NL West Notes: Giants, Dipoto, Zito, Rockies

This winter, the Giants will have 13 players eligible for salary arbitration and seven players hitting free agency. Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle peered into his crystal ball to predict which players would return to the club in 2012.

Tim Brown of Yahoo Sports gives credit to Diamondbacks exec Jerry Dipoto for his role in the club's success. The former interim general manager could have looked for another GM gig after the position was given to Kevin Towers last year, but he instead chose to be a company man. Recently, Tim Dierkes spoke to Dipoto about his career in baseball and his future aspirations.

I allways wondered what was different about the way he pitched from his CY Young season to now. You say its his delivery? Ive seen his stats 1 or 2 of those SFG years wernt that horrible. What is his problem other than age?

There was a whole article about Barry Zito changing his delivery from his Overhand delivery while with the A’s to a 3/4 delivery, which was supposedly going to extend his career. Ironically it turned his career into crap for the second half of it. I’ll see if I can find that article, I’ll link it.

He had his highest K rates really early in his career (when he won the Cy). If you look at his K rates in 2004-2006, they are really pedestrian (highest=6.89/9) along with a progressively increasing BB/9 rate.

He looked like an ace for one reason: he was a flyball pitcher in a park with the second most foul territory in baseball, and balls that would be homeruns were flyouts and plenty of pop fouls were caught instead of landing in the stands, producing extra outs. In other words, he was a slightly above average pitcher with no injury history when the Giants signed him.